This week, for our class site visit, we re-visited the Gary Mary West Center. We arrived with conversation cards to ask any people that were willing to stop by and chat with us. We walked around the center offering snacks to people in the building as an incentive to stop by and have intergenerational conversation with us! I ended up chatting with one woman for the entire duration of this visit. She said she was born and raised in Mexi-Cali, but that now she lives with her daughter in Chula Vista. She told me her daughter is unaware of the fact that she visits the West Center because she chooses to quietly slip out and take the bus to get there while her daughter is out at work. She said it takes her over an hour to get there via bus, and she chooses not to let her daughter know about this because she doesn’t want to seem like a burden on her, which is a common theme among elders living with their family that we have discussed in class. Once she realized that I am Indian, she got very excited and let me know that India is a country that she’s always wanted to visit because she loves the food and the culture so much. I feel like I bonded more so with this woman than I have with any other individual from any other site visit. I’ve been going through some personal things lately, that I haven’t had the courage to share with any other friends. But there is something oddly therapeutic about venting to strangers. Once I opened up to her about these things, she felt comfortable enough to share with me some personal things that she’s been suffering through lately. She enjoyed conversation with me very much as well, I believe that we both talked with one another for two hours! We were the last two people left still engaging in conversation by the end of inter-generational conversation, and I felt bad that I had to cut off our talk so that I could drive my carpool back to campus. She told me she was grateful for our talk and I packed her a few granola bars to take with her. This was an experience that truly moved me, and I hope to have similar experiences at our future site visits!
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Tanveer MoundiWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2019
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